I am a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Oxford, and from September 2025 I will be a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College and the Department of Politics and IR, University of Oxford. For the first half of 2025, I am a visiting researcher in the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and the Center for Social Critique at Humboldt Universität.
My work is concerned with the politics of emotions and mental health, post-conflict reconciliation and theories of immanent critique. I draw on a wide range of sources in my writings, including critical theory and continental political philosophy, but also analytic philosophy, sociological and psychological theory, and cognitive science, among other things. My doctoral dissertation, titled The Miserable is Political: A Critical Theory of Anger and Depression, explores how our emotions can help us understand and resist injustice and oppression, and links debates about immanent critique to work in feminist philosophy of emotions. I teach undergraduate tutorials in political theory and critical theory at various Oxford colleges, and graduate seminars in ethics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.
For my DPhil, I have received funding through a Clarendon Scholarship, the Corpus Christi–A. E. Haigh Scholarship, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Jacobsen Studentship. Previously, I completed an MSc Political Theory Research at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, with a thesis on the politics of mental health and generous funding from an Oxford–Trygfonden Scholarship. Before that, I studied International Relations and Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen and wrote an undergraduate thesis on state apologies for historical injustices.
Contact & Links
Email: jasper.friedrich (at) politics.ox.ac.uk
Bluesky: @jasperfriedrich.bsky.social
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Department profile
Blavatnik School of Government